What's your responsive design process like? Do you feel that it's efficient? The following article is an excerpt from Ben Callahan’s chapter “Responsive Process,” first published in the Smashing Book 5 (table of contents). We've collected some useful techniques and practices from real-life responsive projects in the book — and you can get your hard copy or grab the eBook today. You will not be disappointed, you know. —Ed.

“The successful respondent to this RFP will provide three static design options for our team to evaluate.” I’ve never been a huge fan of taking a multi-option design approach, but I get it — sometimes a client needs this. “Each of these options will provide design for three unique layouts: home page, listing page, detail page.” All right. Now, we’re up to nine static design files. This is getting a bit out of hand.

Michelangelo once said, "The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself." Translate this to the world of Web design and you might say, "No matter how great a designer you are, you’re only as good as your content." While the reality of client work sometimes makes it challenging to gather and produce content prior to starting the design, this is now widely accepted as being necessary.

You may have heard this referred to as “content-driven design.” I’m not the first to suggest that our current approach to responsive Web design could be improved by imparting a bigger role to content in determining how our websites respond. However, I haven’t seen many (if not any) practical explanations on how to do this. I’d like to start this conversation by introducing a theoretical concept called a “content prototype.”

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